Cris Sette's blog

Unfortunately I believe so. Last year I met a group of Brazilian evaluators in a conference, and learned from them the growing demand for good evaluation studies in Brazil, but also the need for more capacity building initiatives in this area, besides the need for practical and relevant  information in Portuguese, with a local context. It was then that I decided to investigate what this passionate group of Brazilian evaluators was working on. Evaluators not only in Brazil but in other Portuguese-speaking countries.

This week, at the Evaluation Conclave in Kathmandu, I learned a great deal about challenges of evaluation practices, along with methodologies available to deal with some of those challenges. 

Most of the work done in development is done in collaboration, in partnership with individuals or organizations who contribute to a particular task or project we are working on. These collaborations are sometimes very straight forward, but sometimes they are quite complex, and involve many links and relationships.

With that in mind, I would like to share an approach I am working on,  Social Network Analysis (SNA). We are using SNA to study research networks, its characteristics and how the network contributes to better research outcomes.

I am at the European Evaluation Society conference in Helsinki and I attended the gender and evaluation session to learn more about approaches and practices. The two presenters (Dr Julia Espinosa and Dr Donna Podems) generated good discussions on evaluating gender and development projects, evaluating projects with a gender component, or using feminist evaluation approach when evaluating a project.